A Web Blog by People Who Care

4Web Inc. creates highly customized websites using Joomla! and WordPress. We use open source software to meet our clients' online business goals and marketing objectives. Experience, honesty and ingenuity are the foundation of our approach for creating engaging, responsive and strategic online business solutions. We take being part of the Web community seriously so we make sure to time to share some our findings here.

For the past few years we have seen a dramatic growth in the number of mobile devices connected across the globe. Google has noticed this too, and starting April 21,2015 they plan to do something about it. If your website isn't ready, the results could be dramatic.

miEdge is a rapidly growing, high-tech software company that provides prospecting solutions to insurance and financial professionals. The miEdge website has to serve ever increasing marketing and sales, online subscription and billing requirements. And the old website could not keep up.

Mark Smith, founder and CEO, and Mary Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer, searched for a reliable Joomla! development team who would not only create a new website but also establish a long-term relationship with miEdge. They found 4Web and immediately recognized that this company could fulfill their wish list and more.

Joomla is Open Source software, as you may know, as are WordPress and literally thousands of other CMS platforms. Open source implies that sharing and volunteering are involved. Joomla Days and WordCamps are opportunities for people who have literally only interacted online to get out from behind their desks and meet in person. Meet, share and learn... I think everyone at these events can do all of these on some level.

Remember, you know more than you think and nobody knows everything. Meet someone you don't know and share something they didn't know. These types of events are one of a kind opportunities to meet the people behind the scenes of open source projects. You might even have the opportunity to meet and talk to the developer of your favorite extension—how cool would that be? Have you ever eaten lunch with any of the developers at Microsoft?

Joomla Day Boston is our next event and it's approaching quickly. It begins on the ultimate Geek day, fondly known as Pi Day (3-14-15). You do remember Pi from high school, don't you? 4Web is the Pi Day sponsor for Joomla Day Boston and we are bringing Pi Day t-shirts as giveaways. We have also been giving the event coordinator a hand in keeping up with the social media push. There is a LOT that goes into putting on one of these events. So it's important to give to the greater good of the project, however you can (attending, time, money, support). We hope to see you @JoomlaDayBoston!

Passwords are more than just a secure way to enter a website; they are a hacker's key to a person's identity. Many people use a single password for many websites, but with all the password leaks and hacks taking place around the world, if your password is accessed, any of your accounts (email, bank accounts) with the same password will open to the world.

What you really need is a unique, strong password for each and every website you visit. But that many passwords would be impossible to remember. Fortunately, there are other websites that will remember for you. There are several leading password managers, including Lastpass, Dashlane and 1Password. You can also use offline software such as KeePass.

Akeeba Backup for Wordpress is the greatest migration solution currently available for WordPress. Not only is it a fantastic backup tool, with multiple offsite backup capabilities such as Amazon S3 or Dropbox, and allows for the ultimate in automated backups through cron jobs, alternate cron jobs, and other supported methods, but it will also update the URLs in all of the content, custom fields, custom post types, and serialized data (widgets) without corrupting or losing any settings. It's a marvelous advance in site migration.